Rambling, rumbling, rumination

Link Sausage

OK, so it’s a weak pun, but I figured it would go over better than something with SPAM in it.

As might seem apparent, this is more game-related links, complete with tangential rumination, with a smattering of other things (as usual). These things tend to be compiled over a week or more, so it’s not going to read as cohesively as a dedicated article. I’ve largely said what I wanted to say about the MMO genre and design, so this sort of tangential discussion will be more common as time goes on. Repeating myself about MMOs gets old after a while. And you just can’t talk to some people.

Besides, Tobold seems poised to pick up the baton on the economics of the MMO genre. (Player side, not in-game economics… but he does that, too, even if it’s just arguing with Gevlon lately.) His bully pulpit is larger, and I’ve already covered this stuff in excruciating detail, so have fun with that baton, Tobold!

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Beau over at Spouse Aggro has a good take on the industry: if players want new, interesting, innovative, different games, they have to stop playing the games they complain about, and I’d add, most importantly, they have to stop paying to play them. Beancounters are pretty simple critters. So are stock investors. They don’t care if a game is innovative, interesting, dull or fantastic. They don’t even care what it is, or even if it’s much of a game at all. They just know whether or not it makes money.

Put another way, players can be Pavlov, writ large and with a hive mind, and the people behind the games (those with the money) will react in simple, predictable ways to monetary stimulus. Threats mean nothing, forum drama means nothing, blogs mean nothing, game design theory means nothing. Even the most passionate and eloquent arguments for better games mean nothing.

These simple critters react to money, and only money. If you want something better than what is offered, stop paying for mediocre work. Stop riding the early adopter hype bandwagon, and wait for companies to offer something you feel is worth your money. You don’t need to give an MMO dev “good faith” money in the hopes of a better game down the road. Only pay for the stuff you really like. Convince your friends to do the same. Leverage that “social engineering” to your own, nefariously revolutionary ends.

Or just keep doing the same old thing, playing the same old games, paying for the same old games. Just know that in the simple spreadsheet calculus behind the scenes, the only input you have into the system is as another faceless $15/month, assumed to be happy with the status quo. And as long as that money keeps flowing, there is no impetus to change. It’s a simple digital signal, and your $15/month tells the devs absolutely nothing about how you’re playing the game, whether or not you’re happy with it, and whether you want something better.

Tangentially, that very low resolution feedback of a sub model is another good reason for a microtransaction model. The finer granulation of how the money is flowing gives devs better feedback on what people are actually willing to spend money on.

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Can Successful Games Be Fun? Good question, and as always, noting that the business model can warp game design is a good warning for those who might want to do this for a living.

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Those who can’t do, teach, right? Not necessarily, and this is a good game design article on the same:

Ivory Tower Defense. I could ramble for a while about how I think education is broken and that we need academic intellectual rigor in production, but that might be better another time.

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I’m famous! Well, sort of. Somebody likes me anyway, and the other bloggers in this roundup have some great articles on tap as well. It’s worth perusing the list, as well as the rest of the “channel” if you’re interested in MMO commentary.

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I’ve been digging a little more into Steampunk lately, which led me to Girl Genius. I’ve heard good things about it over the last few years, but I’m decidedly not a fan of the Foglios’ art. Phil has an annoying obsession with titillation, without the virtue of being able to pretend to be fine art, like Boris Vallejo (though I’m no fan of his, either). Still, he does have a fun humorous edge, and the writing of GG (a duty he shares with his wife, Kaja) turned out to be pretty good. The Steampunk aspects of the comic are well-conceived and rendered as well, if considerably quirky. Oddly, my favorites of the whole series to date are on either end; the recent story with the deathtrap castle, and an early piece about one of the major antagonists and his knack for machinery. It’s one of the few times in the comic that digs a bit into how these “sparks” see things, and I wish there were more such insight.

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Did you know that Video Games are Incredibly Stupid? OK, so that’s obviously an incendiary title, but it’s still an interesting article. Sometimes you can learn more from a well-reasoned critic than from the most sympathetic of sycophants. Not coincidentally, that’s why I like discussions around here that don’t necessarily agree with me. I may not be swayed by arguments, but it’s nice to see what other people think, so long as it’s a reasoned point of view, rather than pointless flaming.

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Syp has a good article up on Combat Alternatives. Some of it sounds familiar, and I look forward to change in the genre in this vein. Syp’s article on storytelling is a great one, too. Having read the Arthas novel recently, I’ve been rather forcibly reminded just how… unfulfilling most game storytelling really is, especially in MMOs. I remain skeptical that Bioware will make a difference, since they really should be making a series of single player games that tell strong story, rather than hoping story can be a selling point in an MMO. I guess we’ll see, but I suspect the nature of the medium (MMO design) will never lend itself well to storytelling.

Game demos… such interesting things. Shamus has a good article up on demos: Your Demo Sucks. To answer his question, I’ve purchased World of Goo, Audiosurf and Defense Grid thanks to demos, and I’m a fan of well-crafted demos. As a late adopter, they are one key to actually getting me to buy at all.

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Chrono Trigger, how do I love thee, let me count the ways… or maybe just refer to this article that ruminates a bit on how the iconic CT stands astride a bit of a generational shift in JRPG design, for games and for the players. I don’t have time to sit by my TV for hours at a time (or my PC) these days, so handheld JRPGs (like Black Sigil, with any luck) are the only way for this old jaded gamer to get his fix. Still, there are things in CT that I really wish had been propagated throughout other games, and the soundtrack is still in my rotation. I’m listening to something from the sequel, Chrono Cross, as I type this, actually. I love that music. Some of the earliest indie game design I indulged in was heavily CT based, and though it seemed perfectly intuitive to me, as far as I can tell, my fairly simple ideas for a CT evolution still haven’t been done.

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I wish I’d had a chance to dig into Myst Online URU. I don’t have time any more, but it looked interesting. I loved Myst. Then again, I’m a fan of puzzles and great art direction and world building, so that’s no surprise. They have made the game open source, so I’ll keep an eye on it to see what happens… but it’s another casualty of the bane of finite time. Better to have a lot of good choices than none, though, I suppose.

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I played Lord of the Rings Online for the trial ten days. The sum total of that experience was a level 7 character of each of the four key races (so I could see the starting areas), a folder full of screenshots, and a traumatized toddler who now fears a troll will break through her bedroom wall. I’ve been sleeping on the couch in the front room with her on the other couch for a couple of weeks now. Yeah, Daddy botched that one. Still, it’s a good game, and I do love me some Tolkien homage. This is a great blog that someone mentioned (Syp of Bio Break, I think) that lets me explore the game a bit more, albeit vicariously:

This is an interesting article on MMO design, framed in a discussion about “contemporary” MMO design. The comments on melee are especially interesting to me, as I’ve always had an interest in swordfighting, despite having pretty much no practical use for it.

I’d still rather see a game that digs into magic the way the Dragon Knight novel series does, but that’s rather more creative and intellectual than we’re likely to see with modern MMO design. (I highly recommend the books, but strenuously warn against the animated movie. It’s from Rankin/Bass, who are otherwise known among geeks for similarly mangling the Hobbit and the Return of the King via animation. Then again, I don’t even like their Rudolph, so maybe I’m just too biased.)

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I’ve been playing Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis lately. I like it a lot. Anyone can use items. Anyone can counterattack, just at different levels of likelihood depending on positioning, facing, class, gear and Agility. (I’ve always thought equipping “Counter” in FFTA was a silly way of constraining its use.) It makes the game considerably more tactical, since you need to be careful how and when you attack. You can also Persuade enemies to join your team mid-combat. That feels a lot like salvaging opponent ‘Mechs in MechCommander 2, another favorite game. I love using the enemy’s assets against them, and Persuasion is also a very good method of recruiting in TOKOL (though Persuaded enemies get the standard Guest AI for the remainder of the battle which doesn’t always help when you’re trying to do something that requires careful planning). The Emblem system is great (Achievements with bonuses!), Classes are interesting, and the game is fun to play. I do wish for a little more transparency and some better UI, and the story is nothing terribly impressive, but this is a great game that I’m glad I bought again. (I bought it years ago via eBay, but it wound up being a pirated copy with “Nintondo” printed on the cart. I threw it away, but have wanted to play it again. Getting a real copy of it secondhand via Goozex made me happy.)

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Good vs. Evil in games is a wee bit… overpolarized and far from intelligently nuanced, and this article is a good read that digs a bit into it: Good vs. Evil

The mapping of “traits” to a set of bipolar spectrums is interesting, but I’m torn between wanting transparency for the player (feedback is essential to understanding game mechanics) and wanting to hide those values under the story, allowing for a more organic approach. His “order of magnitude” escalation between acts is also a bit overmuch, but the concept of a “magnetic moral path” is an interesting one, letting the player dictate the direction of the game by simply playing it.

I’m also not sold on the “death bed repentance” notion of a late game supreme shift in “alignment”, but at the same time, it would offer an ability to see different endings without long replay. That’s one problem with games that allow significant choices; replay is boosted as a result, but if the time to go through the story is long (with much of the narrative being the same, especially in the early game), players may well never want to replay the game to see the “road not taken”. They would be playing half of the game for full price, which doesn’t always sit well. (Not coincidentally, that’s the heart of my opposition to alt-based “replay” in MMOs, especially those with long “character lifespans”. It’s way too repetitive for such a minimal amount of new content on that alternate road.)

Still, it’s an interesting article that spawned some interesting discussion. We could definitely use some better writing in games, and this is one area to explore. It’s tricky, giving control to the players, especially since ego is something that most creative types tend to use to fuel their work. Letting players do something that the designer didn’t necessarily want them to do can be frustrating.

It’s also imperative to give players a real sense of what their decisions affect and how they are important. TOKOL has a couple of story branch points, but there is little indication of what effect one choice has as opposed to the other. Consulting a FAQ gives some sense of what each path offers, but the choice at presentation is nearly meaningless because there’s so little context and so little free will in the rest of the storytelling. It’s almost literally like a switch in the railroad tracks, with each divergent track going off into the mists ten feet away. There’s no sense that the decision really matters because you don’t have any way of seeing how it could. We do operate in a functional vacuum sometimes, but usually not to this degree, and it ultimately undermines the storytelling in the game, turning the game’s four endings into an exercise in repetition (of shared content) and arbitrary switches rather than a real sense of choices affecting anything important.

That’s unfortunate, and it really ignores the potential of storytelling in an interactive environment. (I’ll dig into storytelling in another post, methinketh.)

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And for some fun if you’ve made it this far, go check out Frantic, brought to my attention by Zubon over at KTR. It’s a great little game, and well worth the time to check it out if you like top down shooters in the vein of 1942 or its children.

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[…] something, but they need to show they want it as well, and not just through in-game actions. Tesh embedded a rant in a recent post: "[Game companies] react to money, and only money. If you want something better than what is […]